Cross-language sensitivity to phonotactic patterns in infants

This study explored sensitivity to word-level phonotactic patterns in English and Japanese monolingual infants. Infants at the ages of 6, 12, and 18 months were tested on their ability to discriminate between test words using a habituation-switch experimental paradigm. All of the test words, neek, neeks, and neekusu, are phonotactically legitimate for English, whereas the first two words are critically noncanonical in Japanese. The language-specific phonotactical congruence influenced infants' performance in discrimination. English-learning infants could discriminate between neek and neeks at the age of 18 months, but Japanese infants could not. There was a similar developmental pattern for infants of both language groups for discrimination of neek and neeks, but Japanese infants showed a different trajectory from English infants for neekusu/neeks. These differences reflect the different status of these word patterns with respect to the phonotactics of both languages, and reveal early sensitivity to subtle phonotactic and language input patterns in each language.